What's all this about genetics? : An explanation of inheritance in plants and animals, including man himself, for the ordinary reader / [Rona Hurst].

  • Hurst, Rona, 1897-1980.
Date:
1951]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: What's all this about genetics? : An explanation of inheritance in plants and animals, including man himself, for the ordinary reader / [Rona Hurst]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE JUST fifty years have elapsed since the discovery of Mendel's Principles of Heredity gave such an impetus to scientific breeding and made 1900 the birth year of Genetics. Up to that time the breeding of domesticated animals and plants had been carried on slowly by what may be termed common-sense methods. From the earliest beginnings of farming, herdsmen and agriculturists had been saving their best animals and plants for breed¬ ing. They were always quick to notice any favourable change or combination of characters, and to utilize it for the general progress of their farming economy. As these variations piled up, the animals and plants improved out of all recognition, until today it is difficult to trace the original ancestry. The great difficulty, however, was to fix or make permanent the most desirable characters; they were all too apt to disappear in later generations, or at any rate to be unpredictable in their appearance. At the end of the last century biological science was arriving at a position in which it was realized that if only the variations which occur in animals and plants, and their inheritance, could be intensively studied, it should be possible to do away with this uncertainty and to bring breeding into the condition of an exact science. Various people in this country and in Europe were groping their way towards a solution, unconscious of the fact that the clue had already been found but lay hidden in an obscure publication of the local natural history society of Brünn, in what is now Czechoslovakia. 7
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